SpareWare Review

SpareWare revolves around machines that are trying to save mankind from itself whether that is in Helsinki, London and Las Vegas. In order to save mankind, the robots must defeat waves upon waves of humans as they will do anything to stop the robots from saving the planet as we know it. The humans are police officers of which there are different kinds including standard officers who have batons, riot police who can deflect your firepower, police officers that are armed with rifles and many more.

On first looks the game appears a little outdated in terms of the visuals, it is almost as if it as a PlayStation 1/ PlayStation 2 game – although, I do find it refreshing to see something like that as it has been a while so it is almost retro in style. On the menu screen the player is given several options including a ‘Campaign’, ‘Versus’ and ‘Options’, the options are like any other game where you can change the visuals, sounds and the control layout. The game like Super Dungeon Bros also has procedurally generated maps which is more likely guarantee a unique game play each time the player selects a mission. Also, the game offers a multiplayer experience which unfortunately is local only where you and a friend can work together through the campaign or fight against one another in the versus mode of the game.

When the player selects the campaign they are given an option of the difficulty they wish to play and when they start they are met with the skippable tutorial which allows you to get used to the controls even though there is a small learning curve to learning how the game works and after the controls, you get to learn how the game plays out. When in the campaign the player is given objectives to complete, these can be fuelling up at a station or destroying generators and all of these tasks are accompanied by enemies which there are many types of.

Versus mode allows up to eight players and these players can either play Deathmatch which is another name for a free-for-all which is just two-eight players fighting against one another and then there is Team Deathmatch which is a group of more than one player fighting against another team. With SpareWare the player is given the option to change their team colour which is uncommon as most games usually sort players into groups automatically, there are also other options which includes: level; the shape of the map, score limit; maximum amount of points to win, time limit; how much time the match can run for, player health; all the health each player will get in the match, friendly fire; how much damage is allowed to be inflicted on team mates and respawn time; the time it takes for a player to come back to life.

The player can customise their robot in several ways: loadout; this lets the player customise the legs, torso, head and arms – the arms are also the weapons of which there are twelve different kinds which include rocket launches and machine guns, skills; the player can also equip three of thirty-six different skills which helps a lot throughout the game whether that is healing your robot or getting a little help from your drone which will automatically fire at any enemy that is close by. It is interesting to see more than one player at the same time with a different set up and it can be beneficial when playing the game itself as other players’ attacks can make up for your own.

Overall, SpareWare could do with some improvements just to make it a little bit better. It has a nice soundtrack that gets a bit repetitive after a while, there are various match modes within the versus section of the game which can make things a little more interesting and there is a little quirkiness in the map design as it looks almost cartoon-esque and it also tells the player where they last walked which can be handy if the player feels like they are going in the wrong direction and so they can just go another way. The skill trees and general customisation make it a little bit more interesting as the skills offer just that little extra to the game itself. The downsides to the game is that the storyline does not seem to be fully present wherein the game will drop in and out with cut scenes like other games do which I think would make it more interesting, the procedural maps can be a bit boring as they are still designed in a similar way so it’s just reusing resources and as mentioned before there is no online multiplayer, which if there was it would definitely make a much more interesting game.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.

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